An odd thing happened at It’s Your Festival last weekend. I bumped into my Ward 3 Councillor Matt Green. I told him I had a new play in this year’s Fringe Festival. His response? “Is it political?” And all at once I realized my reputation as a Canadian playwright in Hamilton.

I didn’t set out to write politically-charged theatre. When I first came to Hamilton, the first play I produced was the science fiction story Interface. That was followed by the geek love story Test. But everything after that has been political in some form or fashion. From paranoid rants (Conspiracy of Michael) to Canadian spies (An Ordinary Asset) to Conservative scandals (Finding Mr. Right), most of my work since 2014 has been issue oriented.

Your Own Sons isn’t all that different except that it feels far more immediate than anything I’ve ever tackled. The story of the play is directly inspired by the story of Christianne Boudreau. Ms. Boudreau’s son, Damian Clairmont, left Canada in 2012 after being self-radicalized in Canada. He told his mother he was going to Egypt to study Arabic but he actually went to Syria to fight alongside ISIS forces. He was killed by the Syrian military in 2014.

Ms. Boudreau’s story deeply affected me. As a parent, the very idea of losing a child is horrendous. But to the lose them to violent extremism is this manner is incomprehensible. With every story I saw of families losing their sons to both self-radicalization and war I found myself more and more troubled by an issue with seemingly no rational explanation. What’s more troubling is that Ms. Boudreau is not alone in her experience. It’s estimated that well over 27,000 foreign fighters like Damian have traveled to Iraq and Syria since fighting broke out in 2011.

But the catalyst to write this story, and to find my own voice in it, happened on Oct. 22, 2014. On that day, a young man named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed Hamilton-born Canadian Army reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. Afterwards, Zehaf-Bibeau stormed the Parliament Buildings before being shot and killed by security and police. Like Damian Clairmont, Zehaf-Bibeau had been self-radicalized towards radical Islamic ideology. He had tried to leave the country but had his passport revoked by authorities.

Like many Canadians, I found myself feeling a whole range of emotions as the events in Ottawa unfolded before my eyes. As the tragedy swirled around my old hometown, and later as they impacted my new home when Hamilton paid tribute and bid farewell to Cpl. Cirillo, it was impossible not to draw an invisible line of trauma between the two cities. Writing Your Own Sons has been my attempt to see why I drew an invisible line that day and why it still pulls on me.

Ms. Boudreau’s experience is not my experience. And neither is that of the parents of both Nathan Cirillo and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. But as a father of two young children, I can imagine what it must be to lose your child. I think it’s something every parent must secretly fear deep in their heart. But with the birth of my son, admittedly, I also began to imagine what it must be to lose your child to the type violent extremism that seems to be affecting so many young men. As my correspondence with Ms. Boudreau has revealed, it’s a terrible place to be. Especially when no one seems to be listening.

And I think that’s why I’m compelled to write issue-oriented theatre. With Your Own Sons, I’ve tried to come to grips with a topic that some treat as taboo and others reduce to ideological talking points. As a character from the play admits, it’s “trying to bring some light in”. For me, this is at the core of political theatre: how dialogue on the stage can inspire dialogue in the audience. I hope that will happen with Your Own Sons. Because as hard as this issue is I think it is one that needs to be talked about by everybody.

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A portion of the proceeds from the Festival performance of Your Own Sons will go to Hayat Canada to assist parents and families coming to terms with violence and radicalization involving their children. For more information on Hayat Canada, or to donate, please follow the LINK.